The concept of FUD is really nothing new to Microsoft of course, but this was an actual test run of "can we scare more people away from Linux with an actual IP lawsuit instead of just claiming that it is unsafe?" and it turns out the answer is "no".
Actually, it backfired where I was working at the time. The execs got a SCO ransom letter and said we don't have any Linux do we? The Windows rats said no, but then I interjected. You don't hear much of them as they don't give you much trouble. But here is where 4 (servers) run by the users as I/T wouldn't support them. And I also pointed out key systems, mostly appliances with Linux or BSD inside. They were amazed as it ended the days of "We are Microsoft Only". They now also run Solaris. Today the standard server load is Linux/VMWare with Windows or Linux on top. Still mostly Windows on top, but shrinking. Makes backups and recovery a cinch. Needless to say, I told the company not to pay them as this was fraudulent FUD, and they didn't.
The seeds of change have been planted. CIOs now know Linux is an option.
The only question left is how much of the Sun and Microsoft licenses were for Novell's stuff?
This could be far from over. Sun and especially Microsoft had involvements and the whole story is not clear (yet). Say for example Microsoft should have paid Novell but paid SCO instead as to stifle competition and could prove that. Interestingly enough the Novell legal staff could be busy for years. Say some SCO person, down and on the out has some juicy emails or voice recordings... this could just be part one of a trilogy. Or maybe the SEC will just toss the execs in jail.
My guess is we will hear nothing from the companies who actually paid licensing fees to SCO for their ransom letter. The embarrassment factor alone will keep them quiet.
Again, I'm not an expert in this area, but it seems to me that Dr. Stroustrup tends to define his leadership narrowly and concern himself with programming constructs rather than larger issues such as extension, standardization, and certification of libraries, for example. About C++ garbage collection he says, partly: "See... Hans-J. Boehm's site [att.com]". It seems to me that there are too many areas in which the C++ answer is "You can just go there", rather than "This is the standard, certified method."
You left out his quip about how C# and Java leave twice as many resources open at run time and something about sloppy programing. A run time GC is not something I believe is needed in C++. If you want that, write it in Java and live with the associated bloat. Or pull in someones library that does the same thing. An example: http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Hans_Boehm/gc/
What all programmers can't seem to get through their heads is that it takes years to become "proficient" at any language. Once proficient you then understand why things were done the way they were done. Most critics of C++ wish they had learned it or perhaps spent 1 month with it and thought they were experts at critique.
What mystifies me is the masses often get sucked into propriety closed languages/tools like VB, NET, C# (C-Pound) and others. Trouble is, by the time they actually get proficient the vendor will change the API. To a lesser extent this applies to Perl, Ruby, PHP etc also. And off you are wasting time on relearn tools. Which is why I decided early on to learn C right down to the bootstrap code early on. And later learned C++. Not an easy road, but I spend now spend far less time learning tools and much more time punching performance code.
Call me nuts if you will, but I like C/C++. And suspect, like Dr. Stroustrup does, they have been predicting the 2 year demise in C++ for 12 years and it is still with us. Sun likes Java because it sells big servers to run that bloat ware. Who is kidding who?
Save your hardware infrastructure and give me a god damn free driver.
Unfortunately I could not agree with you more. I used to be an ATI fan through and through. But when they changed their policy I could not get proper drivers support for my OSes I switched to its main competitor and haven't looked back. But I also suspect the competitor's driver problems with Vista are related.
Seems like hardware vendors are going to have to align themselves with an OS. Similar problems exist with wireless cards and the like. Take Broadcom's stance on open source drivers.
My purchase policy, even if I buy Windows is simple, it supports open source drivers or your off my buy list. Even if I have to buy a PC/laptop for dumping Vista to load XP for short term reasons, I know sooner or later I am going to run Linux on it and want to know the drivers are there.
AMD inherited a marketing nightmare with ATI...and emailing them is useless. I tried.
So we've used a few hundred years of technology for almost a hundred years to look for signs of life in a (nearly?) infinite universe and not found anything. Must mean its not there.
With that same logic, I can't see a molecule, but I can see earth, wind, fire and water so we can toss out E=MC^2 and all of molecular theory. Heck, the sun revolves around earth...
Maybe it is our technology and current concepts that are deficient. You can't see an elephant that is right behind you. Perhaps it is us who are looking in the wrong places and just limited by a lack of intelligence to see where they really are. Maybe they even already walk amongst us and say: "Children, this is how our people used to live some 1,500,000 years ago."
Really the best answer to the Fermi paradox is that Earth-like conditions are rare. However, I think we just discovered a planet 20 light years away that has 0-40 degrees Celsius temperature, water, and is a rocky planet, so maybe that is not the answer either.
While that 20 light year away planet might not be the answer, it has interesting possibilities if we (mankind) destroy our planet as we grow with technology but do not grow as fast politically. We should go... and perhaps find intelligence had a war that wiped out intelligence. Could be biological, nuclear or other, but many growing civilization no doubt got major set backs by war.
I for one would think it would be good if one came for a visit...so we realize how small we really are.
alert officials about even the slightest tilting or swaying of critical piers supporting a bridge.
So was not this bridge already warned to politicians that it needed work? Do we need a 5000 DB whistle to make them wake up? The writing was on the wall.
We will as a human race either evolve to vote past voting for hype turkey ass kissing politicians or someday they will foobar us all real big. Fortunately it was less than 30. Could have been worse. Happens in Canada, or shall I say Quebec too: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_Bridge
Makes a lot of sense. Think, instead of saving the middle east, let them knock each other off. Let them buy the bombs for profit. Turn it to bridge reconstruction. No, I am not kidding, I though this parents post was accurate and sane. Why spend billions on Neanderthals when you can build at home.
...architecture is actually one of the few things MS has ever done right.
You give Microsoft too much credit here for NTFS. Like everything else Microsoft it was lifted/borrowed/stolen/copied/architected/plagiari zed from the VMS file system.
I would not consider speed of command line option processing to be bottleneck in any application, the overhead of starting of the program is far greater.
Your just experiencing this with Java, Perl or some other high overhead bloated program. People often pull out a heavy weight needing a 90MB VM or a 5-10MB basis library calling the cats breakfast of shared libraries I would agree, but lets take a look at C based awk for example, it is only a 80kb draw. Runs fast, nice and general purpose and does a good job of what it was designed to do. It can be pipelined in, out and used directly on the command line as it has proper support for stdin, sndout and stderr. On my system, only 10 disk blocks to load.
While fewer people are proficient at it, C/C++ will outlast us all for a language. Virtually every commodity computer today uses it in it's core. Many others have come and gone yet all our OSes and scripting tools rely on it. So any dooms day predictions would be premature, and if your want fast, efficient and lean code you do C/C++....
This fee is already charged in Alberta for the last couple of years. It was also introduced in Saskatchewan in February.
While quite true. Why not do a complete job and have the prison system take ALL garbage, sort it into recycle. Aluminum here, paper there, biodegradable here, electronics there in stead of sitting on their asses for release date.
And cut yet another form of taxation. GST+PST+EST is getting tax nuts. Almost 20% not including excise. As it IS about TAXES -- they want more of YOUR money!
So, is this the University of Kansas Chapter of the RIAA, or will the student only lose his/her use of the network AFTER being convicted in a court? We all know that the RIAA's view of things would have the students losing their rights as soon as an unverified complaint is registered.
I agree with the judge should decide, not the school unless it is academic related or hinders other students use of the network. If the RIAA wants the student, they must follow due process, this means innocent until proven guilty.
However, if convicted, forget about network access - kick them out of school! I am sure there is a "if engaged in a criminal activity you can be discharged..." somewhere. Enforce that as part of what should go into a degree is morality and ethics. But I guess a lot of rich "daddies" would not like that.
It wasn't a foreign machine. It was a Bally S6000 machine. These machines have a bank of DIP switches on the CPU board that are used to set jurisdictional preferences (including foreign jurisdictions). The slot techs screwed that setting up and didn't coin test the game before putting it in service.
And I can't believe they let that happen, which means they in part share the blame. Watched a program the other night on a guy who ripped these bandits off for years....now add flip the dip switches, I wonder who they knew that visited that machine?
I would have thought these machines with todays computer technology would be a lot better in management, qualification and monitoring. This kind of abuse should be trivial to red flag and detect.
Lets see, almost $500,000 in lost cash, not including the money that was put in and assuming $1 coins, that over 62,000 inches of stacked coin, about 1600+ yards of it. You would have thought they would have caught that sooner with that many refills that one machine must have needed. If I was management I would be looking at firing that crew. As I am sure it was refilled more than once per shift.
When management wants a project that IT knows is bound to fail, our company will sometimes hire an outside consultant to run the project. That way, half way through the project, as we miss milestones, we can fire the consultant and blame it all on him. He gets paid, and we get out of the blame. Win-win.
That deserves a repeat. You work for a good CIO with a vision and spine. As this article didn't tap into why many I/T projects really fail. Here are some of what I have seen:
Lack of management commitment and support, underfunding, unrealistic dictated expectations. (Wonderland management style)
Disorganized business model, unstable and changing requirements from poor business leadership.
Your CIO is a but kisser with a short memory, and no rational. Reads CIO and has to do something.
Ignore the I/T and business specialists, but make sure the pandering salesperson gets to sell/tell you the flavor of the day.
Too much overhead and dead weight into the projects stall them. 5 PMs, 5 managers, 10 analysts that know nothing and 1 tech programmer is not uncommon. (too many chiefs and dysfunctional politicians)
It never made any business sense in the first place, but someone with power had to be appeased.
Lack of assessing and developing your organizational capabilities in managing technology. You must know your limitations.
99% of I/T waste is driven by bad business and I/T management practices. The I/T line worker is nothing but the scape goat.
If you think your accounting degree was harder to get than a CS degree, then (at least) one of these is true:
First, I don't have a CS and I don't have an accounting degree either. Mine was electronics engineering with more computer programming and accounting related courses after I graduated.
I also do not doubt a serious accounting degree is tougher than a CS. But if you are getting an education, taking 4 years out to do it and have the smarts, get a real good degree that leads to CA or PEng or PhD. Don't mess or stop with a CS. That is the point I meant for the original poster.
(i) You went to a school with a really bad "diploma mill" CS program, and the CS courses you took for your minor reflected this.
The sad fact of the mater is this industry sees a lot of this.
(ii) As a CS minor, you avoided the hard CS classes, the stuff that CS majors have to learn that sets computer scientists apart from code monkeys
Just because someone minors in CS does not mean they are ducking anything. In fact, possibly quite the contrary, it makes them more diversified which is what business really needs. Someone who knows the reason why we need to compute....
Case in point, say I need to program weather models. Should I hire a CS or meteorologist that minoring in CS?
Or if I want to do cellular embedded systems, maybe hire the electronics engineering type that knows system board I/O and RF communications or the CS that I have to train on hardware and RF?
For information technology, programming days en mases is so last century. The number of programming jobs are shrinking, not expanding. There are probably more people coding for hobbies these days than for employment. As more and more, I/T is outsourced, appliance driven or contracted out to a small very specialized group of people. It will not be long before your Microsoft or Linux support is managed by a remote group....with the local CS guy perhaps being lucky enough to rack the servers and handle end user complaints.
Sadly, it seems like an increasing number of places now run a "computer science" course that is basically just the latest industrial buzzwords. If you're looking at a course that teaches things like VB, XML, Windows/Linux system administration, business studies, web design, and the like, then IMHO that's not really computer science at all, it's just vocational training.
That was also true 20 years ago!!!
Case in point. We needed a practical, fast algorithm to assist in determining when hand-offs for cellular base station, an embedded type application.
The CS types never got their proposal working. The EE types got it working but it was too much overhead. Of all people, a PhD in astrophysics gal not hung up on mathematically correct published algorithms wrote an integer based one that blew all others away in all areas, smaller, faster and more functional in the "real" environment. And we desperately needed it to be #1, we were. And the code was readable. This occurred 17 years ago.
It really hasn't changed today.
It is why I suggest when asked, pick a degree in EE, CA, Chemistry, PhD in Mathematic or some other science. Then add computer skills. It tends to make for a lot less myopic employee, and the I/T business gets this because we have to many soft degrees running it.
Not so funny, but instead of firing up a 90MB VM why not just use C...
#include
int main(int argc, char**argv)
{
puts("Hello World");
}
Only 3912 bytes to load on my system. Bet the farm it loads faster than the VM.
Except for the math, the concepts are simple. For this we have computers.
But being a freshman your not stuck into one theory or another yet, lets examine this statement of theirs for your thoughts:
The mysterious cosmic presence called dark energy, which is accelerating the expansion of the universe....
I have never understood this expanding universe theory at all. The universe expanding in all directions would also make us the center of it. Not likely, as that makes as much sense as the sun revolving around the earth.
What I propose is we are getting smaller and this our perception is the universe is getting bigger... when in fact it is relative, we are becoming smaller.
The cause could be as simple as the tons of space dust that deposit on the earth year, increasing our gravitational density just ever so slowly. Our coordinates 0x, 0y, 0z, 1g -- none of them are constant. Add in the rate of time elapsing is not a constant... our coordinates might be best stated a 0x,0y,0z,1g,1rt While we treat 1g and 1rt as constant, it they are not.
Maybe they are looking for something more complex than really exists?
I would go for accounting and a minor in computers....
First, all anyone cares about 3+ years down the road is you have a degree in something more technical than basket weaving. I have worked with computers my entire career and have a technical degree but it is not Comp-Sci. When the new manager finds out what the degree is, I get no problems as it is a harder degree to get that Comp-Sci.
Second, by having a degree in something other than computers gives you a business advantage. Say you had accounting, then configuring SAP or some other ERP system and understanding a credit and debit, journal entries etc. will all be simple to you.
One good thing about college/universities is they teach you how to learn... using that you can self learn any I/T skill you will need. In fact, a C/S degree does not adequately prepare people technically anyway, and many with a C/S come into the work force thinking they are prepared when they are not. They soon realize that technical skills development is a life long endeavor in this I/T business.
The other advantage is if you don't like it you have a second career path... I/T is not for everyone. And if you have the smarts to be really good technically in I/T, getting a degree leading to a CA should not be hard at all.
Slashdot Mirror
The concept of FUD is really nothing new to Microsoft of course, but this was an actual test run of "can we scare more people away from Linux with an actual IP lawsuit instead of just claiming that it is unsafe?" and it turns out the answer is "no".
Actually, it backfired where I was working at the time. The execs got a SCO ransom letter and said we don't have any Linux do we? The Windows rats said no, but then I interjected. You don't hear much of them as they don't give you much trouble. But here is where 4 (servers) run by the users as I/T wouldn't support them. And I also pointed out key systems, mostly appliances with Linux or BSD inside. They were amazed as it ended the days of "We are Microsoft Only". They now also run Solaris. Today the standard server load is Linux/VMWare with Windows or Linux on top. Still mostly Windows on top, but shrinking. Makes backups and recovery a cinch. Needless to say, I told the company not to pay them as this was fraudulent FUD, and they didn't.
The seeds of change have been planted. CIOs now know Linux is an option.
The only question left is how much of the Sun and Microsoft licenses were for Novell's stuff?
This could be far from over. Sun and especially Microsoft had involvements and the whole story is not clear (yet). Say for example Microsoft should have paid Novell but paid SCO instead as to stifle competition and could prove that. Interestingly enough the Novell legal staff could be busy for years. Say some SCO person, down and on the out has some juicy emails or voice recordings... this could just be part one of a trilogy. Or maybe the SEC will just toss the execs in jail.
My guess is we will hear nothing from the companies who actually paid licensing fees to SCO for their ransom letter. The embarrassment factor alone will keep them quiet.
So, in conclusion, nobody should ever program in anything except C/C++?
Not that at all, but quite a bit more should be. The stuff that lasts the longest is.
Again, I'm not an expert in this area, but it seems to me that Dr. Stroustrup tends to define his leadership narrowly and concern himself with programming constructs rather than larger issues such as extension, standardization, and certification of libraries, for example. About C++ garbage collection he says, partly: "See ... Hans-J. Boehm's site [att.com]". It seems to me that there are too many areas in which the C++ answer is "You can just go there", rather than "This is the standard, certified method."
You left out his quip about how C# and Java leave twice as many resources open at run time and something about sloppy programing. A run time GC is not something I believe is needed in C++. If you want that, write it in Java and live with the associated bloat. Or pull in someones library that does the same thing. An example: http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Hans_Boehm/gc/
What all programmers can't seem to get through their heads is that it takes years to become "proficient" at any language. Once proficient you then understand why things were done the way they were done. Most critics of C++ wish they had learned it or perhaps spent 1 month with it and thought they were experts at critique.
What mystifies me is the masses often get sucked into propriety closed languages/tools like VB, NET, C# (C-Pound) and others. Trouble is, by the time they actually get proficient the vendor will change the API. To a lesser extent this applies to Perl, Ruby, PHP etc also. And off you are wasting time on relearn tools. Which is why I decided early on to learn C right down to the bootstrap code early on. And later learned C++. Not an easy road, but I spend now spend far less time learning tools and much more time punching performance code.
Call me nuts if you will, but I like C/C++. And suspect, like Dr. Stroustrup does, they have been predicting the 2 year demise in C++ for 12 years and it is still with us. Sun likes Java because it sells big servers to run that bloat ware. Who is kidding who?
Save your hardware infrastructure and give me a god damn free driver.
Unfortunately I could not agree with you more. I used to be an ATI fan through and through. But when they changed their policy I could not get proper drivers support for my OSes I switched to its main competitor and haven't looked back. But I also suspect the competitor's driver problems with Vista are related.
Seems like hardware vendors are going to have to align themselves with an OS. Similar problems exist with wireless cards and the like. Take Broadcom's stance on open source drivers.
My purchase policy, even if I buy Windows is simple, it supports open source drivers or your off my buy list. Even if I have to buy a PC/laptop for dumping Vista to load XP for short term reasons, I know sooner or later I am going to run Linux on it and want to know the drivers are there.
AMD inherited a marketing nightmare with ATI...and emailing them is useless. I tried.
A block watch is a great idea too. Neighbors are a security mechanism.
Another good one I find is an Doberman that hasn't had dinner yet.
So we've used a few hundred years of technology for almost a hundred years to look for signs of life in a (nearly?) infinite universe and not found anything. Must mean its not there.
With that same logic, I can't see a molecule, but I can see earth, wind, fire and water so we can toss out E=MC^2 and all of molecular theory. Heck, the sun revolves around earth...
Maybe it is our technology and current concepts that are deficient. You can't see an elephant that is right behind you. Perhaps it is us who are looking in the wrong places and just limited by a lack of intelligence to see where they really are. Maybe they even already walk amongst us and say: "Children, this is how our people used to live some 1,500,000 years ago."
Really the best answer to the Fermi paradox is that Earth-like conditions are rare. However, I think we just discovered a planet 20 light years away that has 0-40 degrees Celsius temperature, water, and is a rocky planet, so maybe that is not the answer either.
While that 20 light year away planet might not be the answer, it has interesting possibilities if we (mankind) destroy our planet as we grow with technology but do not grow as fast politically. We should go... and perhaps find intelligence had a war that wiped out intelligence. Could be biological, nuclear or other, but many growing civilization no doubt got major set backs by war.
I for one would think it would be good if one came for a visit...so we realize how small we really are.
Ubuntu is still far behind Microsoft Windows, when it comes to Windows compatibility.
The reverse is also true, Microsoft is still far behind Ubuntu/Linux, when it comes to interoperability with other OSes.
alert officials about even the slightest tilting or swaying of critical piers supporting a bridge.
So was not this bridge already warned to politicians that it needed work? Do we need a 5000 DB whistle to make them wake up? The writing was on the wall.
We will as a human race either evolve to vote past voting for hype turkey ass kissing politicians or someday they will foobar us all real big. Fortunately it was less than 30. Could have been worse. Happens in Canada, or shall I say Quebec too: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_Bridge
Makes a lot of sense. Think, instead of saving the middle east, let them knock each other off. Let them buy the bombs for profit. Turn it to bridge reconstruction. No, I am not kidding, I though this parents post was accurate and sane. Why spend billions on Neanderthals when you can build at home.
Would this system also have a feature to alert the local road authority, or in a worst case scenario close the bridge?
It was already there, but no one was listening. How do you solve that?
Hear hear!!
Lets have a Microsoft free week. If Microsoft is bashed or put on a pedestal then kill the story.
Incorrect. Americans do not know that we get shafted by Cellphone company collusion to keep prices high.
Your neighbors to the north get real screwed. CRTC big boys club keeps prices double that of the USA.
You give Microsoft too much credit here for NTFS. Like everything else Microsoft it was lifted/borrowed/stolen/copied/architected/plagiari zed from the VMS file system.
I would not consider speed of command line option processing to be bottleneck in any application, the overhead of starting of the program is far greater.
Your just experiencing this with Java, Perl or some other high overhead bloated program. People often pull out a heavy weight needing a 90MB VM or a 5-10MB basis library calling the cats breakfast of shared libraries I would agree, but lets take a look at C based awk for example, it is only a 80kb draw. Runs fast, nice and general purpose and does a good job of what it was designed to do. It can be pipelined in, out and used directly on the command line as it has proper support for stdin, sndout and stderr. On my system, only 10 disk blocks to load.
While fewer people are proficient at it, C/C++ will outlast us all for a language. Virtually every commodity computer today uses it in it's core. Many others have come and gone yet all our OSes and scripting tools rely on it. So any dooms day predictions would be premature, and if your want fast, efficient and lean code you do C/C++....
This fee is already charged in Alberta for the last couple of years. It was also introduced in Saskatchewan in February.
While quite true. Why not do a complete job and have the prison system take ALL garbage, sort it into recycle. Aluminum here, paper there, biodegradable here, electronics there in stead of sitting on their asses for release date.
And cut yet another form of taxation. GST+PST+EST is getting tax nuts. Almost 20% not including excise. As it IS about TAXES -- they want more of YOUR money!
So, is this the University of Kansas Chapter of the RIAA, or will the student only lose his/her use of the network AFTER being convicted in a court? We all know that the RIAA's view of things would have the students losing their rights as soon as an unverified complaint is registered.
I agree with the judge should decide, not the school unless it is academic related or hinders other students use of the network. If the RIAA wants the student, they must follow due process, this means innocent until proven guilty.
However, if convicted, forget about network access - kick them out of school! I am sure there is a "if engaged in a criminal activity you can be discharged..." somewhere. Enforce that as part of what should go into a degree is morality and ethics. But I guess a lot of rich "daddies" would not like that.
It wasn't a foreign machine. It was a Bally S6000 machine. These machines have a bank of DIP switches on the CPU board that are used to set jurisdictional preferences (including foreign jurisdictions). The slot techs screwed that setting up and didn't coin test the game before putting it in service.
And I can't believe they let that happen, which means they in part share the blame. Watched a program the other night on a guy who ripped these bandits off for years....now add flip the dip switches, I wonder who they knew that visited that machine?
I would have thought these machines with todays computer technology would be a lot better in management, qualification and monitoring. This kind of abuse should be trivial to red flag and detect.
Lets see, almost $500,000 in lost cash, not including the money that was put in and assuming $1 coins, that over 62,000 inches of stacked coin, about 1600+ yards of it. You would have thought they would have caught that sooner with that many refills that one machine must have needed. If I was management I would be looking at firing that crew. As I am sure it was refilled more than once per shift.
The casino should be embarrassed.
That deserves a repeat. You work for a good CIO with a vision and spine. As this article didn't tap into why many I/T projects really fail. Here are some of what I have seen:
99% of I/T waste is driven by bad business and I/T management practices. The I/T line worker is nothing but the scape goat.
If you think your accounting degree was harder to get than a CS degree, then (at least) one of these is true:
First, I don't have a CS and I don't have an accounting degree either. Mine was electronics engineering with more computer programming and accounting related courses after I graduated.
I also do not doubt a serious accounting degree is tougher than a CS. But if you are getting an education, taking 4 years out to do it and have the smarts, get a real good degree that leads to CA or PEng or PhD. Don't mess or stop with a CS. That is the point I meant for the original poster.
(i) You went to a school with a really bad "diploma mill" CS program, and the CS courses you took for your minor reflected this.
The sad fact of the mater is this industry sees a lot of this.
(ii) As a CS minor, you avoided the hard CS classes, the stuff that CS majors have to learn that sets computer scientists apart from code monkeys
Just because someone minors in CS does not mean they are ducking anything. In fact, possibly quite the contrary, it makes them more diversified which is what business really needs. Someone who knows the reason why we need to compute....
Case in point, say I need to program weather models. Should I hire a CS or meteorologist that minoring in CS?
Or if I want to do cellular embedded systems, maybe hire the electronics engineering type that knows system board I/O and RF communications or the CS that I have to train on hardware and RF?
For information technology, programming days en mases is so last century. The number of programming jobs are shrinking, not expanding. There are probably more people coding for hobbies these days than for employment. As more and more, I/T is outsourced, appliance driven or contracted out to a small very specialized group of people. It will not be long before your Microsoft or Linux support is managed by a remote group....with the local CS guy perhaps being lucky enough to rack the servers and handle end user complaints.
Sadly, it seems like an increasing number of places now run a "computer science" course that is basically just the latest industrial buzzwords. If you're looking at a course that teaches things like VB, XML, Windows/Linux system administration, business studies, web design, and the like, then IMHO that's not really computer science at all, it's just vocational training.
That was also true 20 years ago!!!
Case in point. We needed a practical, fast algorithm to assist in determining when hand-offs for cellular base station, an embedded type application.
The CS types never got their proposal working. The EE types got it working but it was too much overhead. Of all people, a PhD in astrophysics gal not hung up on mathematically correct published algorithms wrote an integer based one that blew all others away in all areas, smaller, faster and more functional in the "real" environment. And we desperately needed it to be #1, we were. And the code was readable. This occurred 17 years ago.
It really hasn't changed today.
It is why I suggest when asked, pick a degree in EE, CA, Chemistry, PhD in Mathematic or some other science. Then add computer skills. It tends to make for a lot less myopic employee, and the I/T business gets this because we have to many soft degrees running it.
Not so funny, but instead of firing up a 90MB VM why not just use C... #include int main(int argc, char**argv) { puts("Hello World"); } Only 3912 bytes to load on my system. Bet the farm it loads faster than the VM.
Really simple, right?...
Except for the math, the concepts are simple. For this we have computers.
But being a freshman your not stuck into one theory or another yet, lets examine this statement of theirs for your thoughts:
The mysterious cosmic presence called dark energy, which is accelerating the expansion of the universe. ...
I have never understood this expanding universe theory at all. The universe expanding in all directions would also make us the center of it. Not likely, as that makes as much sense as the sun revolving around the earth.
What I propose is we are getting smaller and this our perception is the universe is getting bigger... when in fact it is relative, we are becoming smaller.
The cause could be as simple as the tons of space dust that deposit on the earth year, increasing our gravitational density just ever so slowly. Our coordinates 0x, 0y, 0z, 1g -- none of them are constant. Add in the rate of time elapsing is not a constant... our coordinates might be best stated a 0x,0y,0z,1g,1rt While we treat 1g and 1rt as constant, it they are not.
Maybe they are looking for something more complex than really exists?
I would go for accounting and a minor in computers....
First, all anyone cares about 3+ years down the road is you have a degree in something more technical than basket weaving. I have worked with computers my entire career and have a technical degree but it is not Comp-Sci. When the new manager finds out what the degree is, I get no problems as it is a harder degree to get that Comp-Sci.
Second, by having a degree in something other than computers gives you a business advantage. Say you had accounting, then configuring SAP or some other ERP system and understanding a credit and debit, journal entries etc. will all be simple to you.
One good thing about college/universities is they teach you how to learn... using that you can self learn any I/T skill you will need. In fact, a C/S degree does not adequately prepare people technically anyway, and many with a C/S come into the work force thinking they are prepared when they are not. They soon realize that technical skills development is a life long endeavor in this I/T business.
The other advantage is if you don't like it you have a second career path... I/T is not for everyone. And if you have the smarts to be really good technically in I/T, getting a degree leading to a CA should not be hard at all.